From the monthly archives: June 2011

I believe there has always been a bit of a myth in GIS circles that the quickly growing consumer side of maps/data eschews science. Whether you call it Neogeography, the GeoWeb or NoGIS there is a perception that traditional GIS is where you do hardcore science, and the new stuff is a vacuous world of [...]

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Yesterday we announced that we were making Analysis functions available or everyone on the GeoIQ community site, GeoCommons. As Sean pointed out, this is a revolution in opening access to the tools for anyone to ask their own questions of data without requiring desktop tools or long-training. It’s our hope that through open analysis [...]

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The core mission of GeoCommons is bringing the power of geography to the masses.  First we focused on making data more accessible, then quality cartographic visualization of data, and today we’ve added geographic analysis of data.  Over Christmas we blogged about the “12 Analytics of Christmas” we’d built for GeoIQ.  We are celebrating Christmas in [...]

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Sharing geographic data and maps is at the core of GeoCommons, and today we took it one step further. You can now embed your maps directly into your Facebok feed allowing your friends to interact with a map right there an then. The best part is that you don’t need to do anything special: just [...]

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When we launched GeoCommons three years ago we had high hopes that it would turn into the vibrant community that it is today.  However, I must admit that from a technological standpoint we did not fully predict what the underlying GeoIQ platform would become – a complex, scalable set of [...]

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One of the biggest improvements of Geocommons 2.0 over the previous version is the brand new map visualization engine – codename Sputnik. As was already pointed out here, here and here, we can now render tens of thousands objects extremely fast. For example, the map below map renders over 15,000 points [...]

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In the last blog post we talked about monolithic vs. distributed architectures.  A key part of the argument is recognizing the massive value in the GIS monolith, but also realizing it is just one component of a larger whole.  The new reality is a data ecosystem with many components and users.  That said one of [...]

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To be honest I haven’t played with Fusion Tables as much as I should have by now, but this weekend I thought, “why not?”. First off, I decided to try messing around and get some Fusion Tables data mapped in GeoCommons. As it turns out GeoCommons was fully ready for this, as was Fusion Tables, so doing this way all REALLY EASY. Since it was so easy I started, and nearly finished another , related hack, but more on that another day…

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I’m excited to announce that GeoIQ is adding a talented cartographer and web developer to our engineering team – Zachary Forest Johnson. I’ll let him introduce himself, but let me just say, he’s impressed me since the first time I came across his work three years ago, and it never hurts to flatter us with blogging about some cool hacks using our API.

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This week we released GeoCommons 2.0! We’ve gotten some really positive feedback from users on the new UI and the features we’ve added. I thought I’d write a series of short blog posts over the next few days that help introduce some features of the new GeoCommons and discuss a bit of the technical apsects [...]

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